Walkup's Way Home

 Ethics of Care

"Psychological theorists . . . implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, have tried to fashion women out of a masculine      ( Carol Gilligan  In Different Voice).

"In most liberal theories, there are only hand waves concerning our proper attitude toward our children toward the ill, toward our relatives, friends, and lovers."                   (Annette Baier Moral Prejudices: Essays on  Ethics)
   
                          
Learning Objectives: 
Students will 
  • Be able to define and understand the relationships between the terms "Ethics of Care" and "Virtue Ethics."
  • Understand the distinction between contemporary "Ethics of Care" and the "Ethics of Justice."
  • Understand Gilligan's reservations regarding Kohlberg's ethical growth theories .
  • Understand the difference between men's voices and women's voices.
  • Know and understand Gilligan's  "Three Levels of Moral Voices."
  • Understand three  ethical points highlighted by Annette Baier  in , "The Need for More than Justice"
  • Understand  3 points on virtue  Philippa Foot  highlights in her essay "Virtues and Vices"?
  • Have a familiarity with Gilligan's background, interests,  and concerns.
 
 
   
  What is virtue ethics?
"Virtue Ethics " is an  ethical theory that asks, "How ought we be?"  instead  of ""What should we do?"
The emphasis   is on developing as moral persons.

How is "Ethics of Care" related to "Virtue Ethics?"
"Buddhism, Taoism, feminist care ethics, and the moral philosophies of David Hume, Aristotle, and Jesus are often classified as virtue ethics" (Judith Boss, Ethics for Life, page 383 "Virtue Ethics and the Good Life. c 2004")   Carol Gilligan's ethics fall into a subcategory called "Ethics of Care."
  What is the distinction between the contemporary "Ethics of Care" and the "Ethics of Justice?"

In "The Need for More than Justice" Annette Baier  explains Gilligan's view that "there are two perspectives on moral and social issues that we all tend to alternate between, and which are not always easy to combine." These are the justice perspective and the care perspective.

  • Ethics of Care:  
    • The virtues and values of women focus on connectedness among people. They "care" for individuals and focus on maintaining healthy relationships, even at the cost of self-sacrifice. There is a focus on the concrete existential situation.
  • Ethics of Justice:
    • The virtues and values of men focus on separateness and autonomy. Men are interested in justice, rights, fairness and freedoms that apply abstractly, universally and conceptually.
    • Wikipedia defines  it as follows: "Ethics of justice, also known as morality of justice, is the term used by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice to describe the ethics and moral reasoning common to men and preferred by Kohlberg's stages of moral development. The ethics of justice deals with moral choices through a measure of rights of the people involved and chooses the solution that seems to damage the least number of people. Rooted in a respect for the legal system, it applies in the Western democracy ideas like social contract theory to everyday moral decisions."
 

What is Gilligan's concern with Kohlberg's levels of development ?

Gilligan's concern is that Kohlberg's stages reflect the male path to morality and is not reflective of a woman's ethical/moral growth.  Because men experience and live  life differently than women, a woman scores poorly on Kohlberg's chart.

Kohlberg's Three Levels of Moral Development
1 Preconventional  Child Rote memorization, repetition
Punishment/reward 
2 Conventional Adolescent Internalized norms
3 Post-conventional Few Adults Universalized , non-partial, quest for justice...  Willing to break a law for higher good
  • These levels must be passed sequentially. One cannot skip a level.
  • Operational tests determine a person's level (morality)
  • It is the rare person that will arrive at the top level
  • Females usually don’t make it past the beginning of level 2
  • Kohlberg's chart would lead us to believe females just aren't as morally developed as males.

What is Gilligan's main point/thesis?

Men are not more moral than women; they simply have a different sort of morality.
Women experience  different stages of moral development.

Separation is not a sign of maturity for women. For women  "to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection" (Different Voice page 171). "The concept of identity expands to include the experience of interconnexion (Different Voice 173). "Giving in" to preserve a relationship is not seen as a weakness but as a strength.

How did Gilligan come to this study  and  conclusion?
Quite by accident.
Gilligan had a strong interest in Kohlberg's theory and in moral development.  She was planning to   study the moral reasoning of draft resisters. These resisters, like Kohlberg's  were people who were willing to break the law for a higher cause. (Kohlberg had thrown himself in the Zionist cause and smuggled Jewish refugees past the British blockade of Palestine - when Israel was struggling for statehood.)

Gilligan's study didn't get far because Nixon cancelled the draft, leaving no "resisters" to study.  Therefore, Gilligan decided to study another difficult moral choice:  abortion.

This unplanned shift opened Gilligan to studying  29 females rather than males. Gilligan had not set out to find a female "voice."  Interestingly enough, no one had questioned Kohlberg's research which was male-based, nor had Gilligan  thought her draft resister research to be incomplete as it was also male-based.

What did Gilligan learn  about 'voice" from studying women?

Gilligan learned that women speak in a different "voice" than men, a voice which does not fit into Kohlberg's neat little chart. Gilligan became interested in individual perspectives (voices) rather than cold theories. 

Hinman writes, "Voices combine both emotion and content. How something is said is closely tied to what is said. Voices are embodied in a way that theories  are not."

Voices are evaluated differently than theories.  Simple true or false no longer applies. Life is not black and white but a rainbow of colors. There is a wide range from weak to strong, dull to exciting, harmonious to contrapuntal.....Voices interact in numerous ways. there may be lead singers, solos,  harmonizing, strong and soft voices, etc.

What differences did Gilligan find between men's voices and women's voices?

The basic difference is that women generally see the moral life in terms of CARE rather than in terms of JUSTICE.

Men enter the moral arena when seeing competing claims about  rights.
Women enter the moral arena when they see suffering involved.

For men, the primary moral imperative is treating everyone fairly.
For women, the primary oral imperative is  caring about others and caring about themselves.

Men make decisions by applying rules fairly and impartially.
Women base their decisions on preserving relationships and emotional connections.

Men evaluate  the quality of an act they performed by seeing if it were done according to the rules.
Women evaluate the quality of an act they performed by assessing  the relationship: was anyone hurt & was the relationship preserved

To quote Hinman, "The quality of the relationship  rather than the impartiality of the decision, is the standard for evaluating the decisions of women."

For men, responsibility means "answerable for actions"
For women, responsibility means taking care of another, including the other's feelings.

Men define "self" in terms of autonomy, freedom, independence, hierarchy.
Women define 'self" in terms of connectiveness, relationships   

Differences between male and female perspective
Male Qualities (Ethics of Justice) Female Qualities (Ethics of Care)
The standard for evaluating decisions: Impartiality of decisions The standard for evaluating decisions: The quality of the relationships
Color:  black and white Color: more than shades of gray - a rainbow
Independence Interdependence 
Self is described in terms of autonomy, freedom, independence Self is defined in terms of relatedness, interdependence, connectedness, responsiveness to needs of others. The self is a network of relationships. 
Moral life is seen in terms of justice Moral life is seen in terms of care
Rights give rise to moral issues Suffering gives rise to moral issues
Primary Moral operative: Treating everyone fairly Primary Moral Imperative: Caring about others
Reach moral decisions by applying rules fairly Moral decisions are reached when relationships are preserved and people are not hurt
Responsibility means being answerable for actions Responsibility means taking care of other persons and other persons' feelings in a personal, existential way, rather than as an abstract generality.
Depend on rules Depend on heart and care and connectiveness
Strict rules Making exceptions
Logic and rule-based Caring , concern and relationship based
Morality is primarily about following rules Morality is primarily about caring. it is not about impartial computations of consequences. It concerns responsiveness to suffering and maintaining relationships
Commanding role, decision maker May fail to speak up or challenge someone for fear of offending
Analytical Emotional
  Caring is not just acting in a particular way; it is to feel in particular ways. Thus the ability for feeling and compassion is a prerequisite to the ethics of care

Although  a feminist ethics of care emphasizes "care," it " maintains the importance of relationships, but refuses to cooperate with any efforts  to confine women within traditional patriarchal power relationships" (Hinman  326)

Gilligan developed her scale based on a study in which she interviewed 29 women who had strugled with the decision to abort.  To understand the moral implications of the  chart below, keep Himnam's statement in mind: "No one,  feminist moral theorists argue, should be forced to bear a child against her wish" (330).

Gilligan's Three Levels of Moral Voices

1

Concern for self

  •   Powerless

  •  Eschews connection in favor of the safety of isolation

       

2

Concern for others

(A shift from selfishness to responsibility)

  • Maintains personal connections

  • Focuses on interests of others at the expense of self-nourishment

  • Goodness is equated with self-sacrifice

  • This is as far as many ‘traditional women’ get

3

Balance concern for self and others

  • Maintains good relationships with self and others. Is balanced

  • Realizes that one must care for self in order to care for others

  •   Realizes that caring for others can also count as caring for self

  • Moral goodness is seen as caring for both self & others. the ideal is inclusiveness. Exploitation and hurt is condemned.

  • [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfehr/338%20Gender%20Feminism.htm  Information from chart]

Care ethics expands on Gilligan's findings with women. It is currently one of the most influential theories in philosophy.  Care ethicists say reason alone is insufficient to provide us with guidance and motivation to act morally. It stresses the contextual aspect of morality.

What are three  ethical points highlighted by Annette Baier  in , "The Need for More than Justice" (Canadian Journal of Philosophy vol. 13, 1988)?

 (1) Oppression:
Women and minorities have been oppressed  by the authors of moral law: "The concept of right, autonomy and justice is the same tradition that provided 'justifications' of the oppression of those whom the primary right-holders depended....The domestic work was left to women and slaves...Rights have usually been for the privileged.

(2) Cultivating Emotion:
Dry rational  rules to control behavior are not enough. Cultivating desirable emotions is necessary:  Men "need to love their children, not just to control their irritation. So the emphasis in Kantian theories on rational control of emotions, rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion, is challenged by Gilligan."

(3) Male and Female Synergy:
Wisdom is to be obtained in a union of male and female voices: "Once there is this union of male and female moral wisdom, we maybe can teach each other the moral skills each gender currently lacks, so that the general difference in moral outlook that Gilligan found will slowly become les marked" (page 56)

What is androgyny?
Androgyny is the manifestation of both stereotypical masculine and feminine traits.

What  3 points on virtue does Philippa Foot  highlight in her essay "Virtues and Vices"? (Oxford University Press 2002, first published in 1978 by Blackwell Publishers and The University of California Press)?

(1) On Corrective Virtue
 There is a difference between knowing "how to do good things" and actually doing them.  Therefore virtues are needed as a "corrective disposition."   For example, "if people cared about the rights of others as they care about their own rights, no virtue of justice would be needed."  Natural human passions may tempt us to deviate from the golden mean, to take the comfortable road of not standing firm or of giving in to anger or pleasure

(2)  On Charity and Justice:
 Charity and justice differ from moral virtues in that they deal with a deficiency of motivation.

(3) On what is a virtue:
 Courage is not always a virtue. For example the courage displayed by a murderer is not a virtue. A virtue depends on the character of the actor. On the other hand, although self-preservation is not normally thought of as a virtue, it may be very virtuous ion the part of a depressed individual

Which is better, an Ethics of Care or an Ethic of Justice?

According to Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982), women's morality is not worse than nor is it better than men's morality. We must keep in mind that fully developed moral agents experience a marriage of both & are skillful in both arenas.

In Mapping the Moral Domain (1988), Gilligan contends the ideal moral thinker holds an ethics of care. Kids should not be taught to value their intellect over their hearts. She concludes that women may exhibit more moral sensitivity and depth than men.

Discussion Questions:

  • Provide instances when an ethics of justice would be preferable to an ethics of care & vice versa.   Think of  patients in hospitals and criminal in criminal courts.
  • Can justice and care conflict. If so, which should rule?
  • Are women better suited than men to be nurses?
  • Are men better suited to be judges?       http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfehr/338%20Gender%20Feminism.htm

  • Who has better moral reasoning, men  or women?

  • How do you feel the "Ethics of Care" and the "Ethics of Justice" should be harmonized?

  • Does keeping score and requiring strict justice from a close friendship or relationship poison the relationship?
.  

In a Different Voice

Carol Gilligan


Selected Passages
  1. My work is grounded in listening. (p. xiii)
  2. To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act. By voice I mean something like what people mean when they speak of the core of the self. Voice is natural and also cultural. It is composed of breath and sound, words, rhythm, and language. and voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds. (p. xvi)
  3. In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection. (173)
  4. [Anne Barton says in the introduction to Love's Labour's Lost that] men do not know the women whom they say they love. (p. xvii)
  5. When women do not conform to the standards of psychological expectation, the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with the women. (p. 14)
  6. While women have taken care of men, men have, in their theories of psychological development, tended to assume or devalue that care. (p. 17)
  7. As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development that their experience informs, so we have come more recently to notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak. Yet in the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection. (p. 174)
  8. The moral domain is similarly enlarged by the inclusion of responsibility and care in relationships. and the underlying epistemology correspondingly shifts from the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form to the biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship. (173).

Additional Quotes may be found  here: http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/mfphilosophy.html

Annette Baier's  "Feminist Ethics"

Selected Passages

"In most liberal theories, there are only hand waves concerning our proper attitude toward our children toward the ill, toward our relatives, friends, and lovers."

Women theorists will need to connect their ethics of love with what has been the men theorist' preoccupation, namely, obligation. Men's moral theories...does not ensure the proper care of the young and so does nothing to ensure the stability of the morality in question over several generations.

The virtue of being a loving parent must supplement the natural duties and obligations of justice.

Neither maternal servitude nor the resoluteness to kill off one's children to prevent their growing up unloved, nor the easy willingness to go out and kill when ordered to do so by authorities seems to me to be a character trait a decent morality will encourage by labeling a virtue.

Military life in wartime should always be seen as a sacrifice, while motherhood should never need to be seen as self-sacrificial service.

If it is an honor and a privilege to bear arms for one's country, as we understandably tell our military conscripts and volunteers, part of the honor is being trusted with activities are are a necessary evil, being trusted not to enjoy their evil aspects, and being trusted to see the evil as well as the necessity."

On LOVE: "Indeed it is fairly obvious that love, the main moral phenomenon women want attended to, involves trust, so I anticipate little quarrel when I claim that, if we had  a moral theory spelling out the conditions for appropriate trust and distrust, that would include a morality of love in all its variants - parental love, love of children for their parents, love of family members, love of friends, of lovers in the strict sense, of co-workers, of one's country and it figureheads, of exemplary heroines and heroes, of goddesses and gods."

Regarding Ethics of Love: "Love and loyalty demand maximal trust of one sort, and maximal trustworthiness, and in investigating the conditions for maximal trust and maximal risk we must think about the ethics of love."

Undoubtedly some important part of morality does depend in part on a system of threats and bribes, at least for its survival in difficult conditions when normal goodwill and normally virtuous dispositions may be insufficient to motivate the conduct required for the preservation and justice of the moral network of relationships. But equally undoubtedly life will be nasty, emotionally poor and worse than brutish (even if longer), if that is all morality is.

 

Bonus Information: A picture of women through the ages.

Let's start with Adam and Eve:
Eve was created from Adam's rib - women are subservient
Some say women reserve their lot because Eve tempted Adam. She is responsible.

 Rousseau & Kant believed that women are deficient in reason. Consequently women are deficient in the moral realm because they are unable to comprehend moral imperatives.
 Rousseau writes, "Woman was made especially to please man."

Wollstonecraft Mary  1759-1797 wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women primarily as a response to Rousseau.  She said woman's nature is essentially the same as man's. Moral truths, such as equality, are universal & the same for both men and woman.

John Stuart Mill denounced patriarchal power arguing that women need to be freed from the subjection of men.   Women need the same rights & protection under the law.

Freud said woman's moral inferiority was the result of not so much a deficiency in intellectual development as in psychological development. Because of this women are less capable of acting on the basis of justice.

Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex:  Gender inequalities are primarily the result of upbringing.

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What ethics are common to all caregivers?
Kylea Taylor includes the following chart in "The Ethics of Caring":

  • "Caregiver will do no harm
  • Caregiver will keep confidentiality
  • Caregiver will get informed consent from client
  • Both will tell the truth to each other
  • Both will keep agreements with each other
  •  Client will do no violence to persons or property
  • Both will not act sexually or romantically with each other
  • Both will agree clearly on time, lace, duration of session and fee"

The Ethics of Caring: Honoring the Web of Life in our Professional Healing Relationships by Kylea Taylor, Hanford Mead Publishers, Santa Cruz, California 1995. page 36

He who measures friendship on the strict scales of justice will find he has no friends. L.Walkup

Sources :

Ethics by Hinman
Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics by Annette Baier
In a Different Voice: C. Gilligan

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfehr/338%20Gender%20Feminism.htm

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/gilligan2.html

 http://www.devpsy.org/teaching/moral/different_voice.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 


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